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AMD Catalyst 2013 Linux Graphics Driver Year-In-Review

12-23-2013, 03:40 AM

Phoronix: AMD Catalyst 2013 Linux Graphics Driver Year-In-Review

After earlier this month delivering the 2013 NVIDIA Linux Year-In-Review, an annual article I've been writing for both AMD and NVIDIA since 2005 to cover the Linux driver and support improvements made each passing year, it's now time to take a look at the Catalyst Linux driver releases from 2013. While NVIDIA added many new features to their Linux driver, enhanced many existing features, and continued delivering first-rate Linux GPU support at launch-time, it's not been the same for AMD's Linux team.

It looks like AMD are focusing more effort on the open source drivers than their Linux binary blobs. While it is a bit disappointing the latest cards are under performing on the binaries, if this means the open source drivers are receiving more attention as a result then I can put up with the short term pain for the long term gain.

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While AMD open source drivers are improving quickly they are still behind, two years ago it seemed open source drivers would have caught up with close source drivers (at least as release day support) (http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...item&px=OTI1OQ) but today buying old hardware is still the best solution and the fact closed source drivers are not that good doesn't put AMD under a good light. I don't understand AMD strategy, they are not in the position of dropping closed source drivers but they don't seem to care much and at the same time they are not pushing the open source drivers enough to be a feasible replacement. I wonder if they do have a plan or they are just letting the departments sail by themselves...

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It looks like AMD are focusing more effort on the open source drivers than their Linux binary blobs. While it is a bit disappointing the latest cards are under performing on the binaries, if this means the open source drivers are receiving more attention as a result then I can put up with the short term pain for the long term gain.

And what exactly tells you there will ba a significant long-term gain? The way I see it it is more feasible you'll get long-term results in this case if you boycott AMD graphics until the situation improves.

Seeing such hopeless customers I don't blame AMD they don't put effort into linux drivers and support. After all there will always be a bunch 'that hopes' who will buy the hardware anyway.

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It looks like AMD are focusing more effort on the open source drivers than their Linux binary blobs. While it is a bit disappointing the latest cards are under performing on the binaries, if this means the open source drivers are receiving more attention as a result then I can put up with the short term pain for the long term gain.

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And what exactly tells you there will ba a significant long-term gain? The way I see it it is more feasible you'll get long-term results in this case if you boycott AMD graphics until the situation improves.

The evidence of what has happened in the last year tells me there will be long term gain. More and more AMD users are getting to the point where they can switch out Catalyst for the open source drivers. As per the text in the article:

While the 2013 Catalyst Linux driver updates weren't too great, on the open-source side the AMD Linux driver work was fantastic! AMD's open-source driver improvements in 2013 were splendid. Users of AMD's open-source Linux GPU driver saw Dynamic Power Management support and open-source UVD video acceleration as two of the biggest open-source AMD accomplishments of 2013.

On the open-source AMD driver side there were many performance improvements to the point that for older Radeon GPUs the performance can be sort of comparable to Catalyst. For the Radeon HD 7000 series and newer, the RadeonSI Gallium3D performance is improving and advanced a lot in 2013, but is still not yet at parity to the older R600 Gallium3D driver.

And I wonder if AMD isn't rather focusing on Mantle for Windows, as it makes more sense economically.

At the moment I have to dual boot into Windows for most of my gaming as the games I play aren't supported on Linux, so from a gaming perspective I am getting the full potential still.

Outside of Windows the currently available games really aren't that demanding. I've not found a game yet where my R290X hasn't been able to keep up with my current monitor (1440p@60Hz) at max settings. So while the card could be benchmarking higher everything is nice and smooth and not affecting game play.

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At the moment I have to dual boot into Windows for most of my gaming as the games I play aren't supported on Linux, so from a gaming perspective I am getting the full potential still.

Outside of Windows the currently available games really aren't that demanding. I've not found a game yet where my R290X hasn't been able to keep up with my current monitor (1440p@60Hz) at max settings. So while the card could be benchmarking higher everything is nice and smooth and not affecting game play.

I happily play World of Warcraft on my GTX 770 at 1920x1200 with all options to max in raid 25 with Wine. Of course it's not a very demanding game, but I bet I couldn't play it this way with any AMD GPU :-(

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I happily play World of Warcraft on my GTX 770 at 1920x1200 with all options to max in raid 25 with Wine. Of course it's not a very demanding game, but I bet I couldn't play it this way with any AMD GPU :-(

ummmm. No you probably could. Seriously, the game's recommended specs only call for an HD 4830 or a GeForce 8800 GT. Which were new back in 2008 and only supported opengl 3.2. I haven't tried it myself, but since the open source driver supports 3.2, you could probably play it with the open source driver.